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12/28/2003 Archived Entry: "Oh, R-o-ob, The Bad Words Won't Go Away"

Posted by steve @ 07:03 PM EST [Link]

YES, BUT I DON'T WANT TO HEAR THAT F------- LANGUAGE: John T. McWhorter writes in the Washington Post that we better get used to foul language because we're only going to hear more of it on television.

This has never been more clear than it became a couple of weeks ago, when flavor-of-the-month Nicole Richie, appearing on Fox TV's "Billboard Music Awards" broadcast, casually dropped some classic four- (and more) letter words into her reminiscences of her stint on the reality show "The Simple Life." Fox's switchboard lit up with indignant callers, but the network received not even a slap on the wrist from the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that watchdogs on-air language. That's because two months before, unbeknown to many of us, the FCC had decreed a new era in American public language usage.

After receiving complaints that Irish rocker Bono had crowed, "This is really, really f -- -- ing brilliant!"on the "Golden Globe Awards" broadcast last January, also on Fox , the FCC's enforcement bureau ruled Oct. 3 that this adjectival usage of the F-word does not qualify as "patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Predictably, this has not gone down well with some, from the Parents Television Council (which organized most of the Bono complaints) to congressmen to FCC Chairman Michael Powell himself, who played no part in the ruling and deemed it "reprehensible" that children might hear the F-word in any form on the air. But like it or not, we'd better get used to it. We are today a society that elevates giving the finger to "the man" to a sign of enlightenment. So there are bound to be more such rulings, and at the end of the day, we are best advised to fasten our seat belts and accept them.

Another gift from the 1960s. Thanks.

Read on.